I'm having nightmare problems playing Emergence. I get this godawful crash that completely kills my entire system and the only way out is to restart from the restart button on my PC case.

Its a weird crash and I can't do a screenshot of it because my system locks completely but if you can imagine a multi coloured pixellated screen with the pixels about 20 times bigger than they should be (like when you stare at a TV screen real close), thats what it looks like. It happens every time I play but at random times, sometimes after 2 minutes, other times after 15. Could it be an overheating problem with my graphics card? I had the same problem with HL2 aswell but turning off anti aliasing fixed it whilst it doesn't with Sin. I've tried all sorts of combinations of graphics settings aswell, nothing seems to work.

If anyone has any ideas what could be causing this crash please let me know because at the moment I'm very [img]/forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] and very [img]/forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

Check the temperature on the graphics card with the ForceWare application by right-clicking the NVIDIA icon in your system tray, then go to NVIDIA Display and click on the display you're using. On the left-hand menu, there should be a topic called "Temperature Settings". Report back here when you know how hot it is. You can also put a finger on the graphics card cooler to check if it's really hot even in Windows.

You can also try SpeedFan to check how hot your processor is, among other things.

Can't find anything to do with temperature in the Nvidia display settings. Bugger, maybe its not a feature of 84.21?. Are there any other ways of determining your graphics card heat? apart from opening up the case each time. Its something I'd need to find out quickly after I'd rebooted from a game crash.

by the way, i tried Speedfan (thanks for the link) and after playing for about five minutes shut down the game and checked it again. I can't pretend to understand what it all means yet but if its any help here are comparison temperatures:

There seems to be a big hike in temps for the 2 'Temp 2's' and the Temp3. but I'm at a loss to know where to go from here. Does it just mean my processor can't handle it? or is there a setting somewhere I can adjust? I can't believe an Athlon 3400+ can't cope with a game like this.